


Atitid Pozitif

by ktbl



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Medical Professionals, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:07:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26628028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ktbl/pseuds/ktbl
Summary: “Dr. Ziegler…” Baptiste shook his head, shifting his jaw in thought. “You remind me of someone. I can’t put a finger on it, though. It’s like I’ve seen you before.”“Hah.” The surgeon shook her head as she turned to a sink, running hot water and scrubbing her arms down with harsh antibacterial soap. With her back to him, he couldn’t see her face - but he could pick up the way her shoulders drew a little closer to her ears, and her head ducked down slightly. “I’m a fairly standard specimen, I’m afraid. Blonde hair, blue eyes, rather the Swiss tourism stereotype.” She reached for a cloth and dried off her hands, then turned to him.“No, there’s something about you,” he said after a moment, and then shrugged, stepping up to the sink to scrub himself down as well. Everyone had pasts. He didn’t like talking much about his, and until he could pin down where he’d seen her face, he didn’t want to pry more than that. Wasn’t polite.--Jean-Baptiste Augustin hasn't been able to stay in one place for long with Talon always hot on his tracks. He finds work in an aid camp in Venezuela, and makes a friend.
Relationships: Jean-Baptiste Augustin & Angela "Mercy" Ziegler
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14
Collections: Baptember 2020





	Atitid Pozitif

The sun beat down on the back of Baptiste’s neck, and no amount of boring medical scrubs, lab jackets, or even his preferred cheerful bright shirts would do anything about it. It was hot, humid, and the last thing he wanted to do was be draining stinking abscesses in the hot sun.

But here he was, in a Venezuelan humanitarian aid camp, doing precisely that. He finished with the man in front of him, setting the foul syringe aside. Baptiste put more antiseptic on, packed the wound, and bandaged it.

“You come back in two days and get that changed, si?” He met the man’s eyes, holding up two fingers. “Too long and it might go bad again.”

“Si,” the man echoed, holding up two fingers peppered with scrapes and cuts. “Dos dias.” Two days.

It was all Baptiste could ask for, really: the man knew two days, would hopefully come back, and someone would make sure that the abscess site was cleaned and on its way to healing well. It had been a nasty thing, too - one he didn’t want to think on. He’d seen worse in the Caribbean Coalition, had cleaned up worse there and in Talon’s service alike. He grimaced at the syringe and its contents, snapping the sharp tip of the needle off and dropping that in the sharps bin at his feet, while the syringe went into the biohazard bag. He peeled off his gloves, and glanced at his watch: five minutes until he was off-shift for the day. Enough time to fill out the last paperwork before he was free to clean up and head back to his tent, or to the dining tent for a quick meal.

Visions of his cot danced in his head, warring with a tall glass of ice and something fruity and maybe even alcoholic. He was well on his way towards his cot when he heard a loud voice calling from one of the tents. “I need another hand familiar with surgical procedures, and I need them now. I could use some assistance!”

Baptiste was there at the canvas tent flap before his head fully registered where his feet were taking him.

“What’s the case?”

“Appendectomy,” came clipped, curt tones from behind a surgical mask; a woman’s voice. He didn’t recognize the doctor, but that didn’t surprise him: there was always staff changeover at sites like this. It was part of why he volunteered at them.

“I can handle that. Want me to scrub in?”

“Please.” The doctor’s blue eyes bored into him, and he had the uncomfortable experience of feeling weighed and measured, every part of him laid out, until she turned her eyes away and to the cloth-covered figure in front of her, an anesthetist hovering near with a mask and eyes on the patient’s vitals. “Once you’ve scrubbed in, we’ll see how badly off she is, and if this will be simple or require a more complicated intervention.” Her voice was sharp and steady, words precise.

“ _Pa gwen problem,_ ” he replied in lazy kreyol.

“ _Merci, monsieur. Si vous voulez?_ ” Her French was not Haitian kreyol, no - but it wasn’t Parisian, either.He’d heard it before, had to have, but he couldn’t pin it down. Different.

They moved into the process of surgery, Baptiste drawing on all the care he’d done as a combat medic, finding himself anticipating the doctor’s moves, there with a scalpel or needle or tray, whatever it was she needed. They built an easy flow, and while it never became casual, her clipped tones eased as they located the burst appendix, removed it, cleaned the site, and closed the patient back up. The doctor stepped back from the draped patient, leaving it to the nurse to sort out, and jerked her chin towards the tent flap.

Once outside, Baptiste stripped his gloves off and then his mask, dropping them in one of the bins outside the tent. She duplicated the actions, and untied her gown, tossing it into a different bin for cleaning.

“Thank you for your help,” she said politely. “I was about to finish my shift, before they brought her in. Appendectomies are easy enough but after a long day, another hand is always welcome. Were you just going on shift?”

“Just finished, actually. Can I get you a drink, Doctor…?”

“Ziegler. Angela Ziegler.”

“Dr. Ziegler…” Baptiste shook his head, shifting his jaw in thought. “You remind me of someone. I can’t put a finger on it, though. It’s like I’ve seen you before.”

“Hah.” The surgeon shook her head as she turned to a sink, running hot water and scrubbing her arms down with harsh antibacterial soap. With her back to him, he couldn’t see her face - but he could pick up the way her shoulders drew a little closer to her ears, and her head ducked down slightly. “I’m a fairly standard specimen, I’m afraid. Blonde hair, blue eyes, rather the Swiss tourism stereotype.” She reached for a cloth and dried off her hands, then turned to him.

“No, there’s something about you,” he said after a moment, and then shrugged, stepping up to the sink to scrub himself down as well. Everyone had pasts. He didn’t like talking much about his, and until he could pin down where he’d seen her face, he didn’t want to pry more than that. Wasn’t polite. “Anyway. Can I get you a drink, if we’re both off shift? That was a hell of an operation, especially under these conditions.”

The surgeon seemed to consider it, visibly at war with herself. “That would be nice,” she said finally. “It was just an appendectomy, albeit a more complex case. No more surgeries scheduled, that I feel I ought to be nearby for, but there’s no guarantee something won’t come up. The situation here is more than a little unpredictable.”

He laughed and nodded at her. “You’ve been here only a couple of days and already picking up on that, hmm?”

“I’ve worked in disaster zones before,” Dr. Ziegler answered, looking down at her hands before turning her eyes back onto him. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to be able to start feeling the itch to move along.”

“Hah.” She let out a small, short laugh. “I know that feeling, too. I’ll take the drink - and a stop in the mess tent for dinner, before my stomach wraps itself around my spine, doctor…?”

“Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste Augustin, but I don’t use all that.” He waved a hand casually. “Not a doctor, though - just a combat medic. Caribbean Coalition,” he added quickly.

“I had my time as a combat medic too,” she said after a moment, eyes twinkling. “Though not with the Caribbean Coalition. I think I’d like to hear some of those stories.”

“Let me lead. I know a few of the guys in the dining hall - they’ll get us the good stuff.” He winked, and motioned with a hand.

“You’re in charge, then, Baptiste.”

“So what brings a world-class Swiss doctor to a makeshift tent clinic in Venezuela?” Baptiste took a long drink from his glass. “Sure there’s got to be some clinic out there missing their top surgeon.”

“This is what I do, now.” Dr. Ziegler twirled the toothpick and paper umbrella of her drink between her fingers in a slow rotation. “I had a very… busy early career.” She eyed the little parasol and snorted at something, likely a memory it had kicked up. “This is almost relaxing, compared to that.”

“Oh? What did you do?”

“Started out as head of surgery for a Swiss hospital,” she said wryly. “And then I went into research. A little time as a combat medic for a team of first responders. What about you?”

“Ah, Swiss! That’s the accent. Your French sounded… Different.” He laughed, and it earns him a small smile. “I learned here and there. I was a combat medic in the Caribbean Coalition, like I mentioned. Never had the money for medical school, so I learned the tricks of the trade there.” Dr. Ziegler seemed to stiffen slightly at the comment. “Then I worked with another organization,” he said carefully, unwilling to name it - nothing good would come of that. Talon was another life, and he’d like to see that left behind as fast and as far as possible. “I left on bad terms. _Dan konn mode lang_. Now I try to do a little good where I can.”

“I understand that.” She took another sip of her brightly-colored drink. “A lot of what I do is… putting wrongs right. I have nothing keeping me anywhere, anymore.”

“So you have no family back in Switzerland, then?”

“No. I’m an Omnic Crisis orphan, along with thirty million others. I have old colleagues, friends, but that’s it.” She poked her straw into the drink, shifting the ice cubes. “None of them are in Switzerland, either. Sweden, Germany, England. A few I couldn’t tell you where they are… They keep on the move.” She shook her head.

“Orphans unite,” he said with a flash of a smile. “Me, too. Grew up in Port-de-Paix in an orphanage. Haiti,” he added as an afterthought.

“My condolences.” The words tripped off her lips easily, genuinely.

“It was a long time ago. Made a few good friends out of it. Terrible as it was, wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience.” He thought of Roseline, the friendships made and lost in the years between. “What kind of research projects you do, if I can ask?”

“Nanobiotics,” she said. His eyes lit up - he’d read something on that, years ago. It had inspired sketches and thoughts that led to several prototype projects he’d toyed with, but very little had ever come to fruition.

“You worked with that? No shit,” he said in surprise, pushing back from the table a little. “What did you do with it?”

“A lot,” she admitted, twirling the little drink umbrella in her hands again. “Nothing in use these days. I had research funded, but then… people lied to me about what would be done with it. About where all the work I was doing was going. I stopped doing a lot of the work after that betrayal.”

“I’d like to poke your brain - metaphorically, at least - about the nanobiotics. Always interested me, especially as a combat medic. The idea about what we could do if we could release stronger healing opportunities - biotics projected into larger areas where a first responder can’t reach, but enable them to at least put someone’s critical care into… almost stasis.” He watched her body language carefully, eyes on the spread of her fingers, the shift of her shoulders. Something surprised her, but she hid it beneath her calm. She leaned in, interested.

“You’d need to be able to ensure you were affecting the right organic material,” she countered, “and not expending the biotic energy on inert organics. You would need to establish a baseline of active biological signatures and requisite strength in order to determine-“

“Whoa, hold up, Dr. Z,” he said with a grin, waving a hand. She’d dropped right into technical jargon, expecting him to understand her and follow along. No judgment call about only being a medic, or a novice. Tension in his body eased, his breathing a little easier. “I’ll need to get my datapad out for this, if you’re going to go all technical on me. Or a few more drinks. Probably have some of the old schematics and ideas I’d outlined, anyway.”

“Another night, perhaps?” She sounded almost hopeful. He knew that voice, that sound - finding someone else equally enthusiastic about a pet project. She sounded warmer, softer, not as sharp-edged as her scalpels. “It would be interesting to hear your thoughts. I - I haven’t done much with it, lately. Perhaps you have some ideas that might inspire me to look back at it. Any new developments or iterations with the technology.”

“What’s your shift tomorrow?”

“Early, for the next few days,” she said mournfully. “I prefer the late nights, an old habit, but I don’t have seniority for those yet.”

“I’m on the late shift tomorrow, but off the day after. Meet you once you’re off-shift and we can get technical. Sound all right?”

“As long as there are no emergency surgeries,” the woman said firmly, draining the last of her drink. “But with that - we should both find our beds. I don’t know what shift you have, but I’m expected to be up with the sun.” Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly, and her chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh. “There will not be enough coffee in the world for that.”

He caught sight of her the next day, walking amongst the gurneys and tables and beds and tents, pointing out patients, performing triage, on children and adults alike. She had a gentle touch, though it hid a steel core; he’d caught a shabby-looking man trying to pressure her for medicine for an absent patient, begging for a particularly strong painkiller that the clinic kept under strict control. Dr. Ziegler had refused utterly. The man had raised a hand towards the doctor, and she had dodged it with a speed and precision he hadn’t expected.

“Nothing for you,” she had said in those sharp, steely tones again. “And I will have your name and photograph posted at the gate. If there is a patient who needs treatment, bring them to us for care. I will not be the cause of more suffering.”

Baptiste wondered where she’d served, to be so cool under pressure; war zones came and went, and maybe she’d been Swiss military, Red Cross, MSF. He lost himself in the day’s work, abscesses and extractions, bandaging injuries, administering vaccinations, whatever needed to happen. It was a good change - burns instead of bullet wounds. Even if he had to keep running from Talon, he’d find a way to work on improving things in the meanwhile.

He wondered how Rosaline was doing with her clinic, how different life would have been if he’d managed to get accepted to a medical school. How things would have been if Overwatch had come to Haiti, and he’d had the chance to speak with Morrison or Amari, or Sojourn or any one of their scientists.

He pulled up one of the battered chairs in the mess hall the next afternoon, grateful already to be in the shade. The canvas tent walls were half rolled up and the small fans that tried to run failed, choking on their generators. Someone had soaked cloths and laid them over the fans, drawing cooler air through the room.

Dr. Ziegler dropped down beside him, looking exhausted already.

“Rough morning?”

“How much detail do you want?” She reached for her glass, already dripping with condensation in the afternoon heat. “I can go in-depth.”

“Was it interesting, at least?”

“Interesting enough,” she allowed. “But I’m not here to discuss thoracic cavities right now. Show me what you were working on? Please? I’m curious.”

He pulled out papers and his old, clunky datapad, and spread them out in front of them.

“So this is what I was working on. There was an old research paper - maybe ten years ago now, maybe more? About the applications of nanobiotic technology. I saved it somewhere on here, I don’t remember the authors. But it got me thinking.”

“The authors were Franklin, Lacks, and Ziegler.”

“You sure?” He couldn’t remember, but she said it with unmistakeable certainty.

“I’m the Ziegler.” She took a drink from her glass. “Please. I’d like to know what you thought of it - what you thought it could do.”

“Well - the work here, your work - made me think about applications. During the crisis, there were buildings damaged, sometimes people in places that it was almost impossible to reach. And then in the Coalition, and - later,” he caught himself before Talon tripped off his tongue and wrecked this conversation like it had wrecked his life, “I would find myself with a patient I needed to get to, or a group of them, pinned under fire. I didn’t have the time to get right there myself, but I thought if I could get the biotic field to them first…”

He explained his ideas to her eagerly, laying down the train of thought that had led to the idea for a biotic launcher, and a stasis field. She seemed happy to let him explain is thoughts in depth, the research she’d done and how he saw it applying to the work he’d done, the ways he thought it could be expanded for use amongst civilians. She made the right noises, encouraging him, and he realized he was doing most of the talking.

“Sorry to be going on about this. It’s not often I find someone as interested in this as I am.”

“The feeling is mutual. It’s been a long time since I saw someone so enthusiastic about the medical applications for things like this.” She drew a shape in the droplets on her glass. “Now, please - I want to hear more about something you said a moment ago…” And she asked a string of questions that hovered almost at the point of too difficult, but pushed him into thinking of new routes, new applications, changes he could make.

They were on their third drinks, a pair of shabby cloth towels barricading the accumulated condensation from touching the sketches on paper, arguing about the necessary baseline biological signs that a statis field would need before it could maintain the patient, and how to house it in a small enough unit for field work, when a call for a surgeon came.

“That’s me,” she said, rolling her head around on her neck. “I’m on my way,” she called out loudly, pushing out from the table. “This was good, Baptiste.” He caught something blinking on his datapad, turned away from it to look at the surgeon. “We should resume these discussions later. Find me later, let me know.”

She touched his shoulder once, and was gone with quick, confident steps. He turned his attention back to the datapad. It blinked an alert, clearly from an app he had installed long ago. It must be one he never used - he didn’t recognize any element of it. Baptiste sighed and shook his head. The alert was a pale purple, the a sender name he didn’t recognize. It was an alphanumeric string of nonsense, followed below by nine words.

_Hola, mijo. You need to get moving again. Besos._

Baptiste frowned at the message, and began to collect the papers, squaring them neatly with his fingers, lining up the ragged ends and flattening out the creases. He watched the message, and then watched it disappear off the datapad as if it had never been there.

Say one thing for orphans - they stuck together, no matter what life did to them. He still wasn’t sure how she was managing to contact him without word getting to the higher-ups in Talon, but if anyone could hide her trail, it would be Sombra.

He cleaned up the table and headed back to his tent, setting all his equipment out on his cot and putting it all in order. Clothing, a handful of mementos, some of old armor from his Talon days - he checked it all over, shook it out, and proceeded to roll and repack with military precision. It came down to a duffel bag - packed a little heavy, but it was good enough. If Sombra was letting him know Talon was after him, it meant he had two or three days at most before they were on him. Best to get going now, and be long gone before anyone showed up to reacquaint him with the organization.

He took time to shower and shave, unsure when the next opportunity would be. Baptiste considered his options: the Caribbean remained the best choice, but there was a risk of dragging attention to his old connections. He’d go west instead, he decided, rinsing off the razor. West, towards Columbia - Barranquilla, maybe. Then up into Panama, and along through the chain of countries, ending in Cancun, and to Cuba from there. He’d yet to visit Havana - the bright colors and the music appealed.

Havana, then, in a few weeks - unless something came up before then. Something _always_ came up, a war or a gunfight or a hurricane, but it was nice to have a new destination.

He patted his face clean, pulling on new and nondescript clothes, and went to find the camp administration tent. It wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t easy, but they paid out a portion of his final paycheck from petty cash on the spot, and promised to send the rest. Family emergencies were always difficult, the administrator agreed placidly, eyes flicking out once behind Baptiste towards the tent curtain. They were grateful for his help here, he’d been a perfect set of hands, they’d be happy to have him back any time.

The same phrases he’d heard time and time and time again. And he rarely came back.

He glanced at his watch. There was a hoverbus running a route into town every half an hour - he had time for one more farewell before he’d need to catch it. Baptiste negotiated the maze of tents and whistled in lieu of knocking on the flap.

“Leaving?” Dr. Ziegler looked up as he began to explain, wiping away sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She looked at the moisture, frowned, and wiped off her hand on her pants leg in turn.

“There’s been an emergency, I need to head out and deal with it. It’s nearly time for me to move on, anyway.”

She sighed once, a soft sound he barely heard. There was a look to her he recognized. He’d seen it in his own face, in Rosaline’s, back in the orphanage. Someone leaving, likely never to be seen again. Can’t afford to show any weakness, so time to stop caring. “That’s a shame. I was quite enjoying working with you, and had hoped to resume that conversation again. I suppose I should be glad that you at least decided to say farewell.”

“Maybe we’ll meet again, in better circumstances, hm?” He arched a brow.

“There could be few worse,” she said, rising up from the chair. “It’s been a pleasure working with you, nonetheless. I trust you’ve handed everything off appropriately, caught the nurses and everyone else up…?”

“Not much to do on that front.” Baptiste’s hands hung loose at his sides, the presence of the duffel bag heavy on his shoulder. It seemed heavier in front of Dr. Ziegler, almost uncomfortably so. “Last person on my list to see was you.”

She muttered something in Swiss German. He was certain it was a rude phrase by the tart tone. “Any idea where you’re off to?”

“Somewhere my past won’t be catching up with me.” He offered her a wry smile. “Thinking about Havana, with a few stops along the way. Got some people who got real upset with me when I left and didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“Havana, hm? I was there some years ago. Try the rum,” she added, with a glint in her eyes. “Do you expect them to come calling here after you, then?”

“I hope not, but you never know.”

“Will they be looking for you, or another name?”

“No, they’ll be after Baptiste.” He shrugged, and she stepped forward, extending a hand to him. He took it, then pulled her in for a quick, firm hug that surprised the both of them. “You take care of yourself, all right, Dr. Ziegler? _Sonje lapli ke leve mayi ou._ ”

“Only if you agree to do the same.” Her voice was back to that deceptive calm, with a doctor’s firm tones underlying it, as if there was simply no other option than for him to agree. “What does that mean? It sounds close enough that I feel I ought to know it, but far enough from Swiss French that I clearly do not!”

“Ah…” He frowned, trying to pick the right words. “Have thanks for what took us to where we are now. It's a bit of a motto, I guess. Sometimes it’s rough for me, but it’s one I like. Reminds me that even though I’ve been knocked down, it’s worth getting back up again.”

“Ah.” She tried to repeat it, but her tongue tangled halfway through and she gave a small chuckle. “Practice is clearly required.”

“I’ll leave you with one more before I go.  _Bwa pi wo di li wè lwen, men grenn pwomennen di li wè pi lwen pase l_. ”

“And that one? I haven’t a hope in the world to remember how to pronounce that!”

“You figure it out. Next time - when we pick up that conversation - you tell me.” He grinned, and stepped out of the tent. “Nice working with you, Dr. Ziegler. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

“I’ll hold you to it. It would have been nice to have you around, in my last position.” She smiled, a little sadly. “Keep that positive attitude, Baptiste. It’ll get you far.”

“We’ll see if it gets me far enough.” He winked, and threw her a half-salute, two-fingered and casual, and slipped out the door.

The niggling familiarity of her face stayed with him all the way through Nicaragua, until he gave up, pocketing it away to consider later. There were other things to do, and Havana was waiting.

**Author's Note:**

> Kreyol:  
> pa gwen problem: No problem  
> Dan konn mode lang: People who work together, sometimes hurt each other.  
> Bwa pi wo di li wè lwen, men grenn pwomennen di li wè pi lwen pase l. : Exploring the world gives us more possibilities than staying where we are.  
> Sonje lapli ki leve mayi ou - We must have gratitude for what took us where we are now.  
> atitid pozitif: positive attitude
> 
> \--  
> Want to find me on the interwebs? [](https://dei2dei.carrd.co/)


End file.
